White Sands International Film Festival 2009

In this panel, multi-award winning casting director Jo Edna Boldin and Donn Finn will discuss how to prepare for for telelvision and film auditions. Topics covered are finding your strengths as an actor, how to present yourself for the interview, what your picture resume should look like, what does training mean, and interview and audition techniques. Q & A to follow. Jo Edna Boldin has been a location casting director in Texas and New Mexico for over 25years. Ms. Boldin won the 2008-2009 Artios award for outstanding casting, Studio Feature, location casting for “No Country for Old Men. In 2006, Jo Edna was nominated for an Emmy for casting on “Into the West”. Dallas Women in Film awarded Jo Edna the Lifetime achievement award in 2003. Austin monthly and Tommy Lee Jones named Ms. Boldin the Premier casting director of the Southwest. Jo Edna cast her first TV series “Newscast from the Past” for PBS in 1985. One of Ms. Boldin’s favorite series casting jobs was “Wildfire” for ABC family , which ran from June 2005 until May 2008. As a Feature Film location casting director, Jo Edna has worked with many renown directors including Ron Howard, Jim Sheridan, Alan Parker, Taylor Hackford, Billy Bob Thorton,

Ethan and Joel Coen, Tommy Lee Jones, Paul Haggis, Peter Berg, Lasse Hallstrom, Steven Soderbergh, Terence Malik, to name a few. Jo Edna was on the founding board of New Mexico Women in Film. Ms.Boldin is a current member of theCasting Society of America, the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences and New Mexico Women in Film.

Donn Finn, casting partner in the office of Mali Finn Casting, conducts audition workshops for Acting majors. Donn is also a retired professor in the Department of Theatre and Dance at California State University in Fullerton. His professional stage direction credits include Roger Cornish’s A Class “C” Trial in Yokohama for Paramount Pictures/Apollo Chicago, starring William Peterson (CSI), Dennis Farina, Ted Levine and D. W. Moffatt. For the National Theatre of Yugoslavia he directed House of Blue Leaves, Waiting for Godot, and Vlast (Power). Recent film casting credits include: Undertow, Eight Mile, Phonebooth, Titanic, LA Confidential, Wonder Boys and THE MATRIX I, II and III. In addition, he has served as an acting coach on several films such as the Acting coach for Casey Affleck and Brad Pitt on the Assassination of Jesse James.